First note: yep Michelle, i know this is no special photography-topic but as lots of people here are having lot's of pictures on their hard-discs i hope i'm not all to wrong in posting this one here? waiting for the paddle Ok, let's try to explain what's happening: Opening the windows-explorer, looking for the images-drive. All is fine. Opening images -> folder 1 -> folder 2 (folders with just subfolders but no images) .. still all fine. Opening folder 3 and bang .. have to wait up to three minutes before i see the thumbs of the images (jpg). And that's a folder with just 20 shots (directly from the cam). You can imagine what happens in big subfolders with 100 or more shots. Deactivating the thumb view does not help, XP still seems to open each and any file looking for its content (or whatever). Does any of you know that problem? If the files are smaller (e.g. the older shots from the IXUS) the waiting-time is a lot shorter which seems to indicate some hardware-related issues but as there's no problem with any other type of files i don't really believe in that. Also, in opening the folders with that PSP file-browser or the image-database i use, there's no problem too .. so i think Windows itself is the reason (but i admit, that may be wrong). Is there some switch in Win XP i accidentally hit? Any possible misconfiguration? Or is it something i have to life with? Tom